Parenting & Family Quote by Rick Perry

Rick Perry’s line is built to make federal policy feel like a raid on the nursery: “our children’s inheritance” turns abstract deficit spending into a stolen family legacy. It’s not an economic argument so much as a moral accusation, with “Washington” standing in for a faceless, self-indulgent elite. By blaming a capital city instead of a party, a committee, or a bill, Perry collapses complexity into a single villain you can boo without reading the fine print.

The phrasing does two strategic things at once. First, it preloads the verdict. “Insatiable desire” implies addiction; “failed stimulus plans” declares the outcome; “misguided economic theories” dismisses the intellectual case before it’s even heard. There’s no space left for tradeoffs, timing, or counterfactuals (what unemployment might have been without stimulus). Second, it sutures debt and unemployment into a single storyline of incompetence: they spent too much and still couldn’t deliver jobs, so the entire governing philosophy must be broken.

The context is the post-2008 political fight over the Obama-era stimulus and bailouts, when debt became a rallying symbol for Tea Party-era conservatism and governors could position themselves as the grown-ups in the room. Perry’s intent is to frame austerity and state-level skepticism as common sense, and to turn economic policy into a character test: if “they” spend, “we” pay; if “they” theorize, “we” suffer.